Unconscious bursts of creativity that engender significant artistic endeavors are not necessarily inspired by passionate romantic love alone. Greek mythology believed that this kind of stimulus came from nine muses, the inspirational goddesses of literature, science, and the arts. Muses were long considered the source of knowledge embodied in poetry, lyric songs and ancient myths. Throughout the history of Western art, artists, writers and musicians have prayed to the muses, or alternately, drawn inspiration from personified muses that conceptually reside beyond the borders of earthly love. True to life, however, composer inspiration has emerged from the entire spectrums of existence and being. Nature has always played a decidedly important role in the inspiration of various classical composers, as did exotic cities, landscapes or rituals. Composer inspiration is also found in poetry, the visual arts, and mythological stories and tales. Artistic, historical or cultural expressions of the past are just as inspirational as is the everyday: the third Punic War or the contrapuntal mastery of Bach is inspirationally just as relevant as are the virulent bat and camel. Composer inspiration is delightfully drawn from heroes and villains, scientific advances, a pet, or something as mundane as a hangover. Discover what fires the imagination of people who never stop asking questions.
His mother was British, his father French and his grandmother German! No wonder that Eugen d’Albert (1864-1932) had an identity crisis on his hands! However, the ten-year old quickly pledged his allegiance to Germany, and famously corrected his biography a
Long before Howard Shore got his hands on writing the score for Peter’s Jackson’s monumental Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, Dutch composer Johan de Meij had taken up the call. His Symphony No. 1, “The Lord of the Rings,”
The genius pianist Friedrich Gulda (1930-2000) was lauded for his extraordinary interpretations of the music of Bach, Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven. Highly sought after as a piano teacher, his students included Martha Argerich and Claudio Abbado. However, Gulda openly flaunted
It is prohibitively expensive to stage an opera. In 2012 alone, the Metropolitan Opera in New York had expenses totaling 317 million US Dollars! For one, you need singers, an orchestra of roughly 80 players and a conductor. Some popular
Music and Literature are like twin sisters. Not necessarily identical, but deeply connected in ways that can’t be easily explained. When the great Russian novelist and writer Leo Tolstoy published his1889 novella on the ideal of sexual abstinence and jealous
The nice thing about going to an opera performance is that you get to have fictional dates with characters your mom would almost certainly disapprove of. Take for example Robert le diable (Robert the Devil), an opera in five acts
Tōru Takemitsu (1930-1996) fell in love with western classical music via American forces radio broadcasts during the post-war U.S. occupation of Japan. In fact, he “considered the radio as his first real teacher.” Almost exclusively focused on Western musical styles
The outstanding French pianist Pascal Amoyel takes on the chameleon-like Franz Liszt in this recording of the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (S.173) in this two-disc set that also include the Ballade No.2 (S. 171) and the Liebestraüme, (S. 541).
